NOTE: This story was originally published on July 23, 2010, but is relevant to the Thanksgiving holidays so I wanted to share it again. It has a nice message, too: Stick to your guns this holiday season.

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Roselle, here, a straight 25 year-old woman who’s engaged to the greatest man I’ve ever dated. We’re madly in love, we’re engaged, and we’ve chosen NOT to get legally married. Yes, we are one straight woman and one straight man choosing to commit our lives to each other by NOT getting married. Makes perfect sense to me. Seriously, look at our world today. Marriage does not equal commitment, fidelity or partnership. If the world were really concerned about the “sanctity of marriage” they’d make divorce illegal and punishable by law—just like the way they had it back a long, long, long time ago.

Unfortunately, both my fiance and I are entrepreneurs and are living with his parents to save up money. My fiance’s religious Christian mother’s only rule was that since we weren’t married, we’d have to sleep in separate bedrooms. This was when we were already together two years and I had moved to a different state to be with him. And if that wasn’t enough, she KNEW we were no longer virgins and she knew that when we were elsewhere we’d have sex. So it wasn’t like she was pretending we were virgins, but that she wanted to control the sex in her house–it didn’t matter that we were both grown adults (her son being 30 then). To her, if we weren’t LEGALLY married, we “weren’t a family.” Mind you, her other son (my fiance’s brother) is gay.

Anyhow, she was starting to come around when we told her we had made the commitment to be together for the loooong haul. She didn’t necessarily gave us permission to sleep in the same bedroom, but relented after much arguing at family meetings.

It wasn’t until Thanksgiving last year that the sh*t really hit the fan. My fiance’s sister, now married with 2 kids of her own, is also a really religious Christian. I think even more so than her mom. A few days before Thanksgiving last year, my fiance and I received a letter from the sister–accompanied with bible verses to let my fiance and me know that she, her husband and her 2 kids would not be attending out commitment ceremony because she didn’t agree with “what we were doing” and that she “wasn’t going to allow her kids to call me ‘aunt’ or ‘auntie’.” The letter went on and on about God this and God that and how we weren’t acting the way people in love would really act. We were in f’cking disbelief. Even from being a woman who’s not white, I never experienced such “nice” hurtful ostracism.

So during Thanksgiving, she (the sister) had found out my fiance (her brother) and I were indeed now sleeping in the same bedroom. And she flipped the F out. She insisted that we sleep in separate bedrooms for the sake of her and her kids–and that if we didn’t acquiesce, she, her husband, and her kids would leave the Thanksgiving festivities. My fiance’s mother was in complete agreement now. A few weeks ago, she was starting to come around, even letting us sleep in the same bedroom, but now during this colossal fight, she was right next to her daughter fighting with me and my fiance in their garage at 10pm at night. Screaming, tears, the whole shebang.

I think that’s probably one Thanksgiving memory that will be hard to forget.

So WE left.